T H E P O P A R C H I E B U N D L E :
ICONIC CARTOON CHARACTERS
+ SEX, RACE + AGE DIVERSITY
+ CLASSIC ROCK 'N' ROLL =
A BITCHIN' COMBINATION!
A MARVELOUS LIE PRODUCTION
Art by STUFFED ANIMAL
Costumes by HENRIETTA la del BARRIO
Text by HAMPTON JACOBS
OUR ARCHIES AIN'T ARCHIE'S ARCHIES!!!
So, what if cartoonist Bob Montana's "Archie" characters, created in 1941 and still going strong, were yours to do whatever you wanted with? What would you do if you had the chance to re-invent Dan DeCarlo's "Josie and The Pussy Cats?" Would Sabrina the Teenage Witch still have "chilling adventures" if you wrote her stories? What changes would you make? What elements would you keep? In the marvelous worlds of fan art and parody, these kinds of fantasies can and do become real! As real as the twenty-three cartoon features that make up what we call our Pop Archie Bundle.
POP CULTURE CANTINA AVATAR
Pop Culture Cantina, founded as a vehicle for arts and entertainment commentary in 2006, converted to a fan art format after seven years. In 2013, the idea for a reinvention of the Archie characters came to us. We changed direction and never looked back! Our exclusive focus on the Archie universe has since drawn to a close, but it enabled us to turn the Cantina into one of Blogger's most unique and interesting sites. Forgive us for boasting, but we took an iconic American comic strip that had grown stale and injected much-needed new life into it!
Not that Archie Comics never tried to do better. Between late 2009 and early 2014, the editors dared to imagine Archie and his friends as adults. Life With Archie: The Married Life hedged its bets on what readers wanted to see by creating two future timelines: One in which Archie married Veronica Lodge, and another with Betty Cooper as his spouse.
ARCHIE ANDREWS AS AN ADULT
Despite this dubious double premise, the series was the best thing Archie Comics had done in years and it proved popular. Unfortunately, it wasn't popular enough: Lagging sales figures brought The Married Life to a premature end with "The Death Of Archie". In a quickly-thrown-together series finale, the company's flagship character got killed off foiling an attempted assassination. This cheap publicity stunt was a huge disappointment for fans, and it's tempting to say that our fan art series was a reaction against it. However, SAY GOODBYE TO RIVERDALE was well in production by then.
Our adult versions of Archie characters deviated notably from the Archie Comics versions, but those deviations weren't capricious. They were meant to add diversity, but to the characters themselves rather than to the strip. Comic editors have been doing the latter since the 1970s, but we didn't feel that those efforts were sufficient. In addition, we didn't think the Archies Rock band had been fully exploited for story ideas.
By the turn of the new century, Archie Comics had begun treating The Archies as an afterthought. We decided to place them at center stage! We portrayed the members as adults and modeled them on Fleetwood Mac, the 1970s supergroup. (The Country band Little Big Town was also an inspiration.) Then we erased their uniform WASP backgrounds and gave them a rich ethnic mix of Irish-Catholic, Italian, Jewish, Australian, Native-American and Japanese heritage. It wasn't a question of changing the characters but of revealing their previously-hidden layers.
REGGIE "GINO" MANTLE
AS AN ADULT
Reggie Mantle, a very misunderstood character in our opinion, got the most revamping. We retired his outmoded bully boy persona and made him an ambitious risk-taker. We also made Reggie pansexual, which prompted us to add Kevin Keller to our narrative as his future love interest. (We can't take full credit for this idea BTW: It was hinted at in an issue of Keller's now-defunct Archie Comics title.) Kevin, who we nicknamed "Kelly" became an unofficial sixth Archies member.
THE ARCHIES RECORDING THEIR 2014
TRIBUTE ALBUM TO ABBA
Establishing that The Archies had enjoyed success as college students in the 1980s, we had them reunite as married couples in the year 2001 (Archie with Veronica and Betty with Juggy). Benefit concerts for victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks launched the group on a series of often R-rated adventures that no artist, writer or editor at Archie Comics would ever have conceived! SAY GOODBYE TO RIVERDALE ran to six chapters, beginning in late April and ending in late June of 2014.
So we were finished with The Archies (or so we thought), but we immediately started thinking about a sequel. By the fall of 2014, we had created The New Archies, composed of Garcy Briseño (daughter of Archie supporting character Dilton Doiley), Donna Dante, Frankie Fujiyama, Mal Hypster, Toby Maxx and Rikki Ninja. Sabrina "Bree" Spellman, who we re-imagined as a successful record producer and recording studio owner, founded and mentored this colorful group.
It was totally diverse, with Gay, Bisexual and Transgender members and an array of non-White ethnicities (Stockholm-born Toby was the sole White musician). The girls in the band were out front, singing and playing guitars, and the guys danced on stage. We gave The New Archies a sassy nemesis in the person of Carmen Serna, a Salsa-singing witch, not to mention her murderous, man-eating pit bulldog Miss Fang! Then we let our imaginations run wild. Their ten-year soap opera of an adventure took them from Boston (their home base) to Broadway, Hollywood, Saginaw, Nashville and Tel Aviv and back again. A nonagenarian Archie Andrews makes a cameo appearance in the finale of our six-part serial MAMA CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE.
Next up was ARCHIE-F*CKING-MANIA! in April of 2015. In terms of continuity, this is the most important entry in our Pop Archie Bundle. It's set in the future, and by the last page, each member of The Archies has died! Both before and after we bid them all goodbye, a large amount of exceptional Archies music gets marketed, and that's what this three-part series is really about.
Vintage Pop and Rock music has always been the main inspiration for our cartoon narratives; each and every one is dripping with Oldies titles. Here we imagined a series of vinyl album reissues that serve to consolidate the legendary status of both The Archies and their successors, The New Archies.
FORSYTHE "JUGGY" JONES
AS AN ADULT
Even though ARCHIE-F*CKING-MANIA! was essentially a bridge between series, we took the opportunity to introduce several new characters. The most important would turn out to be Diamond Faws aka Deacon Diamond, who resurfaced in a different guise in 2019 (and who took on yet another new face in 2021). This fanciful overview of Archies vinyl is our most original endeavor; you won't see its like anywhere else.
THE NEW ARCHIES IN COSTUME FOR THEIR
2040 BROADWAY MUSICAL "DON'T TOUCH
MY GUITAR"
ARCHIE ON BROADWAY was conceived in 2014 and it began life as a plot device in MAMA CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE. Then it was a Pop Culture Cantina sidebar feature for several months. Finally we moved it over to our "main stage" in early 2015. A story within a story, it all but demanded to be explored further.
We had the racially-diverse New Archies take the Broadway stage portraying a fictionalized version of their White predecessors. Written by Betty Cooper and directed by Sabrina's cousin Ambrose, "Don't Touch My Guitar" was a Rockabilly musical set in segregated 1950s New Orleans. You'd expect an Archies stage production to be one of those jukebox-style revues like "Beehive", "Leader Of The Pack" or "Smokey Joe's Café", but DTMG is nothing like that. It's a wrenching drama that climaxes with The Archies coming face-to-face with the Ku Klux Klan!
BETTY COOPER AS AN ADULT
We actually wrote a treatment for this imaginary show, and for the music we borrowed songs (released and unreleased) from the famous "Archie" cartoon series of 1968-71. If it sounds like a dodgy proposition, it may very well be; but we thought highly of our Archie musical treatment, so much so that we decided to give it a high profile. For decades, Archie Comics has wanted to put a musical on Broadway! That could yet happen but if it doesn't, it won't be for lack of a workable concept. With original music, this show concept could really take flight.
RAMSAY KHALID SHARMA,
SOUTH ASIAN POP ICON
We shuffled group members in both The Archies and The New Archies. Late in the MAMA CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE narrative, we replaced a departed musician with multi-instrumentalist Ramsay Khalid Sharma. He would star, and other members of the New Archies would guest-star in OEDIPUS RAM, our only ten-part series to date. You could call it a continuation of MAMA CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE, but it was conceived as something far more ambitious: A thematic re-write of the ancient Greek play "Oedipus Rex", complete with tragic incest plot twist.
None of our Archie and Archie-related fantasies are meant for children, but this story pushed the envelope farther than we ever did before or have done since. In addition to incest it dealt with rape, sexual harassment, drug abuse, homophobia, homelessness, Asian race prejudice, prostitution and suicide. Some of the images Stuffed Animal drew for this series are quite shocking, to say the least!
We went to great pains to portray OEDIPUS RAM'S South Asian antihero as a sex symbol. We did so in reaction to a demeaning Internet poll taken in the mid-teens, which claimed that most White people saw Asian men and Black women as sexually undesirable! Nigerian-American Donna Dante and Punjabi Sikh Ram Sharma definitely put the lie to those ridiculous and offensive notions, and they remain our hottest romantic couple. Everything about OEDIPUS RAM is hot! In fact, it was too hot for most readers to handle. Despite loads of promotion, the Ram Sharma saga never became popular. Even so, we are prouder of it than anything else we've presented at Pop Culture Cantina.
If you try to follow up an epic adventure with another epic adventure, bitter failure is usually the result! We went in the opposite direction and initiated a series of short cartoon stories. Hampton Jacobs started pulling previously-untold events out of our SAY GOODBYE TO RIVERDALE narrative.
FRONT COVER OF OUR 2015
"BEST OF THE WORST" POP ARCHIE
PORTFOLIO
2016's ABBA-NORMALITY is the story of an Archies album that didn't happen. Against the backdrop of aborted album sessions, the disintegration of Betty and Juggy's marriage as well as of the Archies group itself plays out in four-color cartoon pageantry. It was a first for us: All of our narratives up to that point had been rendered in just three colors: Black, green (or sometimes blue) and red. Here we added yellow to the palette, and more colors were soon to follow.
Then we gave readers the one-two punch of INSIDE CHERRY VAGINA and HEAVEN HELP THE NON-BELIEVER that same year. These short stories were written and drawn in answer to two questions: Why didn't The Archies write their own songs, and why did they never record any songs by Toni Wine? Wine, a real-life singer on Archies records from the Sixties, entered our narrative as a former background singer for the band. She was the only singer/songwriter involved with the project who didn't contribute material. We devised an explanation for this song gap and also filled it! Here at Pop Culture Cantina, we specialize in that kind of thing.
VERONICA LODGE AS AN ADULT
Don't let the provocative title fool you: INSIDE was a straight-forward telling of the history of Cherry Vagina Music, a publishing company founded as a depository for songs written by The Archies. It develops that these songs got farmed out to mostly Country acts, and that gave Stuffed Animal the chance to draw likenesses of his favorite Nashville stars. NON-BELIEVER revealed the story behind Veronica's extramarital affair with Juggy, which was touched on in SAY GOODBYE TO RIVERDALE. A little bit of the supernatural and a whole lot of naughty made it our second most original entry in the Pop Archie Bundle. Both features were two-parters and both were rendered in full color.
We did post one final three-color feature in 2016: The two-part LEGACY OF A ROCK 'N' ROLL WITCH QUEEN. In this mini-sequel to MAMA CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE, we made a few additions to the New Archies discography, elaborated on the group's relationship to Sabrina and showcased some leftover artwork. Leftovers often taste great warmed over, and the same thing can be said about Stuffed Animal's cartoon cast-offs!
Our second bridging feature was THE GREAT AMERICAN ROCK 'N' ROLL SONG BOOK. No longer available, this series ran from Summer to Fall of 2017. This was another opportunity to give some of our large backlog of unused artwork a home. However, its main purpose was providing readers with a definitive online list of every classic Pop and Rock song recorded by The Archies. Divided into six parts, the SONG BOOK read like an extended recording studio log.
Early on, we decided to not dream up imaginary song titles for The Archies to sing. With a handful of exceptions, we always used real titles. Why? Because the virtual soundtrack they provided us with made the text and artwork much more fun to create! There's nothing like cartooning with the radio on, even it's only in your mind's ear.
From the beginning, every Pop Culture Cantina cartoon feature has been inspired by Rock 'n' Roll standards. The Pop Archie Bundle is as much a celebration of that music as it is of the Archie characters. THE GREAT AMERICAN ROCK 'N' ROLL SONG BOOK set the stage for 2020's GOD BLESS ROCK 'N' ROLL, but there'd be a couple of detours on the way to what was conceived as our grand finale.
Pop Culture Cantina founder Laura Pinto requested that we do a feature on Josie + The Pussy Cats. A series about an all-female Rock trio begs to be given a "Valley Of The Dolls" kind of soap opera treatment, so we jumped at the chance! As with The Archies, we had no inclination to portray them as teenagers (and lately, neither has Archie Comics much to their credit). We gave Josie, Melody and Valerie new surnames and disparate backgrounds, remixed their ethnic heritages and sexual orientations, and then dropped them smack dab! in the middle of Hollywood circa 1970.
ALEXANDRA CABOT WITH JOSIE +
THE PUSSY CATS IN HOLLYWOOD,
CIRCA 1970
The 1970 Josie + The Pussy Cats TV series serves as a backdrop for the action. There's a Charles Manson-type subplot, a tribute to the Russ Meyer cult film Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!, and we find Alexandra Cabot and her witch cat Sebastian dabbling in voodoo; but VARIATIONS ON A THEME CALLED PUSSY RIOT centers on typical trials and tribulations that any group of young, talented women might face as they try to realize their dreams in a man's world. In our humble opinion, this 2018 three-parter is ripe for film adaptation! Ditto for our 2024 update MOVE IT ON THE BACKBEAT.
Film adaptations were definitely on our minds when we conceived our first "mock screenplay", THE FREAKING OUT OF GERALDINE GRUNDY. We even gave it a soundtrack in the form of several linked YouTube playlists. The year 2019 coincided with the 50th anniversary of The Archies' 1969 megahit record "Sugar, Sugar" and we wanted to commemorate the occasion. It was a given that we'd set our anniversary story in the late '60s; but instead of starring The Archies, we pulled The New Archies out of storage and gave them their first full-color adventure.
Sabrina the Sorceress came along for the ride, as did villainous siblings Jason and Cheryl Blossom, but not so you'd recognize them. Nobody was who he or she seemed to be in this convoluted tale of magic, music and racial tension. When it was all over, two characters were dead and one had given birth to a child! The broad repercussions of FREAKING OUT will no doubt resonate in future cartoon screenplays (such as our latest, MOVE IT ON THE BACKBEAT). Stuffed Animal outdid himself creating the period artwork, and Henrietta la del Barrio (an alter-ego of Stuffed Animal) really kicked ass designing period costumes!
2019 was filled out by ARCHIE ON TOUR and ARCHIE ON TV, two mini-features that shed light on aspects of the adult Archies saga that we'd overlooked: Concert tours and TV specials. They both set the stage for 2020's GOD BLESS ROCK 'N' ROLL, a city-by-city chronicle of The Archies' farewell world tour. We catch up with the group a decade from now, just a few years before Sabrina founds The New Archies. America's most famous cartoon Rock band is now past retirement age, but not past giving their fans an eyeful with revealing costumes!
Reggie Mantle has left the group, but dude makes a colorful cameo appearance accompanied by ex-convict mariachis. (Only at Pop Culture Cantina do you find delicious contrasts like that.) One of Reggie's replacements, Trevor Smith, also shows up: Will he dare to dance naked on stage? Or will Trev chicken out because he thinks 65 is too old to be doing such things? Read the damn story and find out!
TREVOR SMITH AS AN ADULT
Toni Topaz and Kevin Keller (now a full-fledged member) join Archie, Betty, Veronica and Juggy on a trip around the world that ends up being less about adoring crowds and more about family ties. Along the way there are flashbacks, shameful secrets revealed, bath time with a lovable pygmy alligator, a transsexual dance troupe and a close encounter with a White supremacist record producer!
We couldn't resist throwing readers a few curve balls before sending their favorite cartoon rockers out in grand style, with an SRO gala in their hometown of Riverdale USA. Did we forget to mention that the "eternal" Archie/Betty/Veronica love triangle finally gets resolved? This second "mock screenplay" closed the curtain on our irreverent but ultimately true-to-form version of The Archies, but certainly not for good.
Our sixteenth headliner was, like ARCHIE ON BROADWAY, "promoted" from understudy to leading player. The two-part COMPLETE HISTORY OF ARCHIE RECORDS was compiled in 2014 at the same time SAY GOODBYE TO RIVERDALE and MAMA CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE were being written. The output of Archie Records is an important part of that first series so for reference purposes, we wanted to list every imaginary single, EP and album.
This label discography differs from THE GREAT AMERICAN ROCK 'N' ROLL SONG BOOK in that it documents recordings by Archie (solo), Veronica (solo), Big Ethel, Trevor Smith + Savoy Sound, Kevin Keller, Josie + The Pussy Cats, Toni Topaz, Blue-Eyed Soul and Beau Jacques (a pseudonym for Dilton Doiley) as well as The Archies. Stuffed Animal whipped up a hot mess of new cartoon artwork to give our Archie Records chronicle a proper "main stage" debut.
In December of 2020, we augmented the Bundle with a special feature called FORTY ROCK (later updated as THE BEST ARCHIES ALBUM EVER!), and in June of 2021 we presented the New Archies sessionography ROCK + ROLL IN COLOR. Our next feature was set a few years prior to The Archies' farewell tour. RIDE, RIDE, BABY was simultaneously a celebration of hit records by Latin Soul songwriter Bert Berns and a tragic meditation on sex, race and Rock 'n' Roll. We followed up with THE SMOKE STACK MURDERS, a "whodunit" mystery starring college-age Archie characters; and then we presented our very first online book: DESTINATION: SUGARTOWN! This fifteen-chapter reboot of 2017's GREAT AMERICAN ROCK 'N' ROLL SONG BOOK is narrated by Sabrina and Salem, two of our favorite Archie supporting characters. The aforementioned BIG HURT, posted in September of 2023, is a linking feature that marks the 10th anniversary of Pop Archie Bundle; and our latest feature is MOVE IT ON THE BACKBEAT, a continuation of the time-travel storyline than began in THE FREAKING OUT OF GERALDINE GRUNDY.
And that, nuestros amigos, is how our Archie Comics fantasy became real: With lots of luck, imagination and hard work! There's a ton of Archie fan art out there, but we believe Pop Culture Cantina is the world's biggest online Archie fan art archive; and what you see in this Bundle only scratches the surface of our backlog. We've kicked all the mediocre stuff to the curb and packaged the very best of our product for your convenience and enjoyment.
So scroll back through the Cantina's graphic novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories and "mock screenplays". Don't forget to peruse our sidebar features, too! You can always take an extended trip through our alternate Archie Comics universe free of charge. And . . . who knows but that you may be inspired to create your own?
The Pop Archie Bundle is written and illustrated by a Black Gay homeless artist, in homeless shelters, libraries, train stations and temporary residences in Kansas City, Missouri and various locations in the State of Massachusetts. It is dedicated to the African diaspora, especially Lesbians and Gay men in The Philippines, México, Nicaragua and the Caribbean with whom I share British and Hispanic heritage.
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